Avatar The Way of Water. Does James Cameron's Anti-Western Epic Hold Water?

 

Avatar: The Way of Water
Does James Cameron's Anti-Western Epic Hold Water?

 

On December 18, 2009, a movie opened that would make history. James Cameron, producer, director, screenwriter, and self-identified "king of the world," had previously created blockbusters like Titanic, The Terminator, and Aliens. Avatar cost $237 million, with another $150 million for marketing. Avatar would have to break box office records just to break even. Avatar did indeed defy skeptics' low expectations; it broke records in numerous categories. Avatar is one of the highest grossing films of all time. Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards and was well-received by film critics, professional and amateur.

A Christmas I'll Never Forget. The Value of Life; The Value of Death.

 

A Christmas I'll Never Forget
The Value of Life; The Value of Death

 

On December 25, 2014, I arrived at her house at four p.m. She was in bed. The TV was on. No one else was home. I sat in the chair in the corner.

 

She had had a really bad autumn. There were times in autumn, 2014, that, as I left the various institutions, I thought I might never see her alive again. She was in three different institutions. I failed to see the point of moving her so much, but I was not in charge.

 

The bad stretch began in late summer. Against doctor's orders, she had been doing heavy labor in her garden. She fell; the cut became infected. Her daughter was furious. "Why was she working in the garden?"

 

"Because she's a Polish woman," I wanted to say. I kept mum. Her clueless daughter: so much never passed from our generation to hers.

 

My sister was slipping away from us, and no one could explain why. She was terminally ill. We knew that. They had informed us with the brutality of a hammer blow in May of 2013, after she was stopped by police for driving erratically. If her daughter or her husband used verbs that seemed to indicate too much of an investment in any kind of future tense, the oncologist would summon us into the hallway and he would stare at them, his brows as heavy as cement. He specializes in a cancer, nicknamed "the terminator," that removes his patients within a matter of months. How he does this I do not know. 

Scrooge Gets Screwed in "Spirited." Apple Studios Propose "A Ramadan Carol"

 

Scrooge Gets Screwed in Spirited
Apple Studios Propose "A Ramadan Carol"
 
A mason jar full of tea sat near my left elbow. The tea's assignment was to keep me alert on this short and dark December day. My headphones pumped Brandenburg concerti into my ears; their beauty and symmetry would help me focus. And then I began to read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol for the umpteenth time.

 

I was rereading ACC because I had just watched Spirited, an Apple Studios, 2022 retelling of the Dickens classic. In spite of its star power, Spirited is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Its failure struck me as symptomatic of the influence of Woke and the West's abandonment of its roots.

 

The West's increasing retreat from the Judeo-Christian tradition has inspired much discussion. Will we discover that Dostoyevsky is correct, and "If there is no God, everything is permitted"? Our traditions, though, have affected more than our morality. Narrative, that is, the stories we tell, the stories that direct our lives, and the stories that simply make sense to us have been fashioned by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Anyone doubting this need only sample traditional narratives from the Ancient Pagan Mediterranean, Africa, East Asia, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. Characters, plots, and structure differ so greatly from those found in traditional Western novels that an American reader might not even recognize a traditional text as a story at all. When I assigned such material to my students, they were overwhelmed and confused. The words on the page were in English, but the stories' scaffolding, their worldview, were untranslatable.

 

There are many ways to conceive of human life. One way, popular in India, sees life as a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; note the wheel at the center of the Indian flag. The Christian view of a human life is a straight-line trajectory. A human is born, once. He is a unique individual empowered to make choices, and he responsible for those choices. He then dies, once, after which he inhabits the eternity his choices dictate.

 

Confession requires Catholics to meditate on their actions and motivations. A plot emerges, one that demands individual change: one is a sinner; one chooses confession; one is purified. That focus on the interior life of even common people, and that past, present, future plot trajectory, when applied to literature, populated novels with dynamic, individual, choice-making characters, characters capable of change, characters not found in literatures more focused on transcendence or on a rigid and unchanging group, rather than individual, identity. In a Western narrative, a slave can be a hero, a handsome person can be wicked, and characters can behave in ways contrary to the position they were born into.

 

Rereading A Christmas Carol surprised me. Given that I'd seen multiple adaptations, and have committed some lines to memory, I expected the reading to be a boring chore. In fact my mind and heart were Dickens' playthings from the first line. I felt real goosebumps; I laughed; I'm not ashamed to admit that I shed real tears. News flash – this Dickens guy is a great writer.

 

I had remembered ACC as a secular text, about as religious as a shopping mall Santa. In fact ACC is suffused with Christianity. For example, the three spirits can be seen as an allusion to the Trinity. Scrooge is to be visited over the course of three days; an allusion to Jesus' time in the tomb.

 

"Marley was dead": the first three words. Dickens' emphasis on Marley's death, and that death as a terminal condition, is abundantly Christian. Marley lived his life badly. He was suffering an afterlife of pain for his bad choices. He would never reincarnate, never dissolve into the Atman, never fade into nothingness as those on earth who knew him forgot him. Not all Christians believe in an eternal Hell of torment, but certainly that is the dominant view, and without that Christian view, ACC would make zero sense.

 

Christophobes like to bash Christianity for this understanding of human life and destiny. In fact the Hell implied in ACC is a very flattering concept, one that vivifies lives if understood correctly. We humans matter. The creator of the universe is lovingly noting our every thought and action. We are powerful; we write our own fates. We can, with the turn of a heart, earn an eternity in paradise. A conviction of personal meaninglessness torments many. The Christian concept of eternity suffuses human life with deep meaning.

 

"God save you," Scrooge's nephew, Fred, calls out to him, early in the tale. That's exactly what transpires in the following pages. God saves Scrooge. Again, a loving God intervenes to rescue us from our own bad choices, while never taking away from us our free will to make those bad choices. Fred reminds Scrooge of the day's real meaning. Christmas is "due veneration" because of "its sacred name and origin." Because of that, on Christmas, we should be "kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant." At Christmas, we should remember that even those persons of different social stations to ourselves are "fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." This insistence on equality is a very Christian idea.

 

The opening pages of ACC repeatedly emphasize how dark the day is. "The fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages … The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible." Of course it's dark; the sun would set in London before four p.m. on a late December day. Dickens' dark is astronomically accurate but it's also symbolic. Scrooge is living in the dark; the salvation offered by the God who is the light of the world will, at the end of the tale, brighten Scrooge's vision.

 

Dickens cites Satan as the antagonist of Saint Dunstan, who gained fame by besting Satan in their repeated folkloric encounters. Clearly, Dickens wants us to know he is telling us a fabulous tale, a scary tale, a funny tale, but ultimately a tale about the battle between good and evil.

 

When Marley haunts Scrooge, Marley's face "came like the ancient Prophet's rod." The prophet here is Moses. Moses famously offers pharaoh multiple opportunities to save himself, just as Marley offers Scrooge the same opportunities. Marley is terrifying, but Scrooge had previously been offered, by Fred, an invitation to the joy of Christmas. He rejected the God of joy, so now he gets the God of wrath.

 

When Marley's ghost unwraps the scarf around his face, "its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!" I don't know if Dickens intended an allusion to Robespierre, famous and deadly enemy of Christianity, but it's what I thought of. When the machine of Terror that Robespierre had enabled finally arrested him, he attempted to shoot himself, but he only damaged his jaw. At the guillotine, the executioner removed Robespierre's bandage and his damaged jaw fell.

 

Marley, even as a ghost, expresses that emphasis on individuality that is the signature of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Hinduism your reincarnation is significantly dictated by your caste. Marley, though, writes his own eternity. His Hell is his own "incessant torture of remorse." God isn't torturing Marley; Marley is torturing Marley. His fellow damned souls make "wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory." Even after death, there is a "self" to accuse. Even the damned retain individuality in the afterlife. This is a Christian concept. One damned soul attempts to help a starving mother and child; this is an allusion to Luke 16:19-31.

 

Marley says that his job wasn't just to worship; it was "to do unto the least of these as I have done unto you." That is, as Marley puts it, "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business." Light could have saved Marley, had he but seen it. "Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!"  

 

No one believes that there was a real man named Scrooge who was visited by three spirits. And yet the tale raises real goosebumps. How? Dickens' ample mastery includes his ability to tell deep truths in the midst of entertaining fantasy. Scrooge is believable as a sarcastic bastard who has convinced himself that he has all the answers. "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" he asks, when asked to donate to the poor. Like an arrogant New Atheist, Scrooge has a snarky comeback for everything. When Scrooge drops the snark and begins to exhibit fear, the reader feels that something serious is going on. When Scrooge, visiting his own lonely childhood, wishes he could relive the moment when he was offered the chance to be kind to a poor child singing Christmas Carols, but was, instead, cruel, this reader cried real tears. A moment as real as a flower blossomed from a dry, lifeless page recounting unreal events.

 

Scrooge is as overwhelmed by his life review as are Dickens' readers. Still resistant, still clinging to his own ego rather than accepting, with his open hands, the salvation offered to him, Scrooge struggles to kill the light emanating from the head of The Ghost of Christmas Past. "He seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head … the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground." This passage echoes John 1:5. The next spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, makes its presence known through light. Scrooge is terrified. The spirit, "being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts."

 

The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to numerous difficult settings, where the poor work ugly jobs. Even so, they encounter "an air of cheerfulness … that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain." Men stationed at a remote lighthouse "had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea." Humans' choice to embrace and spread light, in spite of the misery of immediate circumstances, "was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death." Again and again, the poorest of the poor are endowed with the ability to change their fates. No, they can't snap a finger and become rich, fathom life's imponderables, or evade death; rather, than can choose to focus on the light offered them, and to spread that light. Dickens not only harkens back to John 1:5 here. He prefigures Viktor Frankl's insights in Man's Search for Meaning.

 

Dickens, the magician, packs a powerful punch in the visit of the final spirit. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his own death. Again, we know this is fantasy; we know neither this encounter nor anything like it has ever occurred. But Dickens moves us to our core. How?

 

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge a corpse. The corpse's face is covered. "The cover was so carelessly adjusted that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon Scrooge's part, would have disclosed the face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it; but had no power to withdraw the veil … there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think."

 

Dickens invites us into Scrooge's arrogant, pathetic, ego-based self-delusion; that depiction of a frail human ego, a self-satisfied atheist who has all the answers, too rigid and timid to accept the vast and overwhelming reality of the Divinity, is what moves us. The reader knows that Scrooge is witnessing his own death and its ugly aftermath. Scrooge can't accept this, and so he refuses to see this, and he attempts to bargain with this spirit's revelations. Scrooge is not just afraid of death. He is afraid that death is indeed not the end, as he has told himself. There will be an afterlife; there will be a reckoning; there will be an eternity when he himself will choose to bear the consequences of his earthly arrogance, cowardice, and refusal to accept the light.

 

When I was reading this encounter, I was not just deeply moved; I was in awe of Dickens' authorial skill. Scrooge, the "old screw," will be changed by an encounter with the truth – a motif that would certainly occur in a scrupulously realistic text. In fact that is the narrative that is supposed to occur in Freudian psychoanalysis.

 

Dickens closes this encounter with defiant words. Death is not the big deal. The big deal is that a man has lived his life hiding from the light. Men who embrace the light can indeed say, with Chaplain John Donne, "Death be not proud." Dickens declares, "It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!"

 

"Golden sunlight" floods the scene after Scrooge's conversion. Scrooge "went to church," and then performed acts of charity. ACC begins "Marley was dead;" it ends, "God bless Us, Every One!" ACC would simply not make any sense without the underpinning of a Judeo-Christian worldview.  

 

Spirited is a 2022, Apple Studios remake of A Christmas Carol. It stars Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. Ferrell is Scrooge, who, in this version, has been haunting people on Christmas for almost 200 years, successfully convincing them to reform their lives. Ryan Reynolds is Clint, an unscrupulous political operative whom Scrooge attempts to reform. Spirited was directed, co-written, and co-produced by Sean Anders. Its runtime is two hours, seven minutes.

 

Spirited is an inept and incoherent jumble. Bodies and objects, plot points and attitudes galumph around the screen like drunken dinosaurs in a hopelessly misguided ballet class. The film includes maudlin tear-jerking, failed attempts at humor – example – "It's weird to see a Canadian without mittens" –  refusals to commit to anything authentically human, a musical quote from Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, an allusion to Busby Berkely dance routines and to the movie Elf, cameos by Judi Dench and Jimmy Fallon, and product placement ads for the French-beauty-care brand Sephora.

 

The narrative keeps running off the rails. Characters begin songs or dances and another character says don't sing or dance now. Scene aborted. During a genuinely spooky scene, a character makes a sarcastic comment; scene aborted. A song begins; a character breaks the fourth wall and explains to the audience, "This is a musical." Scene aborted. Suddenly a troupe of overweight tap dancers start their stomp, stomp, stomp, strenuously attempting to communicate, perhaps through morse code.

 

Why is Ferrell's Scrooge wearing basketball sneakers and an unstructured quilted jacket that looks most like a Mao suit? No idea. Sunita Mani, The Ghost of Christmas Past and the token Asian, wears a red night shirt, an oversize, misshapen white hoodie, bare legs and ankle-high boots. Why is she – and no one else – costumed thus? Ask the tap dancers.

 

The tonal shifts are as jarring as the shifts in sets and costumes. Spirited depicts two deaths by suicide, alcoholic parental abuse – involving a puppy, no less, cancer, and a burning human being running from a bombing. All this is interspersed with smug sarcasm that is never funny enough to justify its callous intrusions into what are transparent, unearned manipulations of the audience.

 

Dickens, in Scrooge, gave us a believable villain. Spirited just gives us cute, charming, smug Ryan Reynolds being cute, charming, smug Ryan Reynolds. He displays the same twinkly eyes and dimples he displays in romantic comedies. He does not require redemption, so the plot stalls.

 

Ferrell, as Scrooge, never so much as attempts an English accent. Reynolds, playing an American, does attempt a Cockney accent so wretched that he makes Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sound like Michael Caine.

 

The lead actors attempt to sing and dance. They fail. Apparently the idea that one should be able to sing and dance to star in a musical is another antiquated, elitist -ism that we must reject.

 

It's as if Samuel Beckett, who gave us the absurdist drama Waiting for Godot, where the choppy undermining  of Western narrative's traditional trajectory is actually the whole point, had written a Christmas story.

 

In the original Christmas Carol, "Marley is dead" is the first sentence and death is a narrative fulcrum. In Spirited, characters choose to die and come back to life. Clint dies; no matter; he still hangs out in the mortal world. Scrooge is dead. On a whim, he returns to the physical world. He then attempts suicide. He then takes on a new human life.

 

In Dickens' ACC, "good" and "bad" are objective realities, and there is an important difference between the two. In Spirited, Scrooge (Ferrell) regrets that "I've been obsessed with wrong and right." Smug and charming Clint (Reynolds) has taught Scrooge that "the line between good and bad is not so clean."

 

In the original, the spirits exercise the authority of weighty truth, a truth Scrooge must acknowledge when he confronts death in the form of his own corpse. In Spirited, the spirits sent to save Clint exercise no authority. They are awkward failures. Clint sexually seduces Mani, the Ghost of Christmas Past. Clint makes a laughingstock of Scrooge, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and drives him to suicide. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, as voiced by Tracy Morgan, is a wannabe stand-up comic whose so-funny-I-forgot-to-laugh catch phrases include "Welcome to the Bone Zone."

 

In the original Christmas Carol, Scrooge initially makes arrogant snarky comments to fend off his confrontation with truth. In Spirited, Clint's arrogance and snark are the authority. Ferrell's Scrooge, who believes in such old fashioned concepts of good and bad, truth and lies, life and death, or sin and redemption is rendered a buffoon.

 

Again, Catholic confession reinforced a Western concept of telos, of past-present-future. I was a sinner; I am now repenting; I shall soon be redeemed and washed clean. Spirited argues against redemption, against change, and against hope. Ferrell's Scrooge is stricken with overwhelming depression. Though he has been successfully saving souls for almost two hundred years, sunk in blinding despair, he convinces himself that he is unredeemable, that no one ever changes, that he has never saved anyone, and that he must kill himself.

 

Modern psychiatry would diagnose Ferrell's Scrooge as suffering from major depressive disorder. Catholicism teaches that when a mentally healthy person despairs, he denies God's ability to redeem his creations; thus, in a healthy mind (as opposed to one crippled by mental dysfunction) the conscious choice to despair is a sin. In Spirited, Ferrell decides to kill himself after initiating a romance with Kimberly (Octavia Spencer), a vulnerable woman who would no doubt be destroyed by her loved one's decision.

 

Spirited, meant to be a bouncy Christmas Carol update, in its rejection of God's salvation, plunges its characters into a completely different conception of time, and therefore narrative. If, in the world of Spirited, there is no such thing as good or bad, and people don't change, and people are unredeemable, we are all doomed perpetually to marinate in our own unchanging, debased natures.

 

But wait. Spirited does offer a light at the end of the tunnel.

 

Diversity!

 

Spirited opens with a subplot that never recurs in the rest of the film. It bashes that modern villain, Karen. "Karen" is a racist, misogynist, Woke insult for white women. In Spirited, a white woman named Karen Blansky – note the Polish last name – is not Woke. Christmas spirts teach her the error of her ways. She resolves to become Woke.

 

Karen lives on an ice-bound suburban cul-de-sac of McMansions. In the streets, neighbors play ice hockey. The players are a black woman, a Chicano man, and a Chicano child. Well, no. Anyone playing ice hockey in this setting is going to be a young, white male. A black woman and a Chicano man are shoehorned into this scene, not for their own benefit, not to tell their story, but to cover the filmmakers' backs.

 

When a ghost first appears to Ryan Reynolds' Clint, Clint asks, paraphrase, "Why save me? There are worse people." Who are those worse people? "Racists," Clint replies. Woke can smash all religious norms, yet sin remains, and its name is racism. Spirited's demographically dishonest miming of diversity provides redemption.

 

Scrooge works with a team of soul savers. One, for no discernable reason, speaks Japanese to a character who speaks only English. Similarly, characters briefly speak Spanish and French, again to English speakers. One man sports an elaborate braided hairdo; another man wears a mustache, dangling earrings, and a supercilious look; the suggestion is that these men are transgendered.

 

Ferrell's Scrooge, who assumes the "Ghost of Christmas Present" role, is a white man; Christmas past, Sunita Mani, is an Asian woman; Christmas yet to come is a black man: the diversity trifecta.

 

Ferrell's Scrooge is always the center of attention. Mani and Morgan, the Asian woman and the black man, are never more than afterthoughts. Their identities mean nothing. Their roles could have been assigned the identity of Eskimos or Greek diner owners or Basque shepherds; there would be no need to change a single line of dialogue or a stitch of their costumes.

 

An Indian-American's story might involve immigration, high hopes, arranged marriage, caste, and advanced placement classes in STEM. No effort is made to weave that unique story into the plot. The filmmakers merely exploit Mani's brown skin and big, dark eyes as a corrupt purchased indulgence that earns Ferrell and Reynolds their ticket to the Heaven of stardom.

 

Dickens describes The Ghost of Christmas Past in detail. That ghosts's appearance serves the narrative in a vital way. Remove Dickens' description of how this ghost looks and the narrative is the weaker for that exclusion. Mani's Asian appearance and her random costume mean exactly nothing. In place of a contribution that advances the plot, Spirited leaves an empty space. Those who enjoy Mani's presence enjoy her presence not because of story, not because of art, but because her presence allows themselves to pat themselves on the back about how "tolerant" they are of "brown" people.

 

Clint first appears at a convention of Christmas-tree growers in British Columbia, Canada. In some shots, the majority of Christmas tree growers are black or female. In real life, British Columbia is one percent black, and, in real life, the majority of Christmas tree growers are white men.

 

Spirited features a dance-free, song-free "song-and-dance" number set in Victorian England. Oliver Twist, a famous fictional character, makes a cameo appearance. Twist begs Reynolds and Ferrell, "May I have some more?" This line comes from Dickens' novel. Oliver Twist, a starving workhouse orphan, begs for food. Here is that scene:

 

The gruel was served out … The gruel disappeared … Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity,

 

"Please, sir, I want some more."

 

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds … The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.

 

"What!" said the master at length, in a faint voice.

 

"Please, sir," replied Oliver, "I want some more."

 

The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle …

 

"That boy will be hung," said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. "I know that boy will be hung."

 

Dickens is recording the very real starvation that the poor faced. In Spirited, the starving boy's appeal is a joke; it is made to rhyme with "whore."

 

A-List celebrities, Reynolds and Ferrell, two white men, dominate the foreground. Behind them, in many shots, the majority of Victorians are black. Their black faces serve one purpose, They are there to provide forgiveness to the filmmakers for starring two white men.

 

Dickens' novel Oliver Twist may have been inspired by the life of Robert Blincoe, "At four Blincoe was abandoned to a workhouse, never to see his family again. At seven, he was sent 200 miles north to work in one of the cotton mills of the dawning industrial age. He suffered years of unrelenting abuse, a life dictated by the inhuman rhythm of machines."

 

William Blake also wrote of England's children, virtually enslaved to deadly labor.

 

"My father sold me while yet my tongue

 

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"

 

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep."

 

The treatment of child chimney sweeps, aged between five and ten years old, was abusive and, ultimately, deadly. See here.

 

"In London, in 1830, the average life span for middle to upper-class males was 44 years, 25 for tradesman and 22 for laborers. Fifty-seven of every 100 children in working class families were dead by five years of age." At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, height differences between the rich and poor increased to five inches. The poor were so much shorter than the rich because they were malnourished.

 

In America, Lewis Hine exposed the dark side of child labor. My dad was one of those kids; he was a child coal miner. Children were chosen because they could fit into narrow mine shafts. Like many who grew up poor, my dad was short; raised in a different America, his sons all grew to over six feet.

 

Photos convey what words cannot. Please view this photo of a child in Victorian England, his back scarred from abuse. Similar photographs from the Liverpool City Library document the lives of real children like the fictional Oliver Twist.

 

The filmmakers' choice to depict Victorians as blacks is inaccurate. Victorian England was majority white. The workhouse widows and orphans, the street urchins about whom Dickens wrote with such power and such impact, children like Tiny Tim who sickened and died from malnutrition, were white. That Apple Studios distorts reality to serve Woke is what the Woke themselves would call "cultural appropriation." And they would call it something worse were anyone ever to commit the obscenity of staging a song-and-dance number on an antebellum plantation and depicting the slaves as majority white, and their pain as the punchline of an obscene joke.

 

There is a well-placed, diverse actor and character in Spirited. Academy-Award-winner Octavia Spencer is a 52-year-old, fat, black woman. In Spirited, she plays Kimberly, who performs opposition research for Clint, research that could damage people's lives. Kimberly is conflicted about her work, calling herself a "terrible person." She does it, though, because her mother was a cleaning woman, and she regards her high salary as a sign that she has achieved "The American Dream." We look at Spencer, see her ethnicity, her age, and her physical condition, and we know that if Kimberly were to quit her morally questionable job, she'd never find any other job that would pay as well. In this case, the actor's appearance is not just Woke window-dressing. The actor's appearance serves the narrative.

 

Who is the God of Spirited's High Church of Woke, and where is Spirited's Heaven? God is a filmmaker. Heaven is a movie studio. Scrooge and his soul-saving colleagues produce cinema. Throughout the film, Scrooge and his fellow soul-savers speak movie-industry jargon into head sets. They say things like "Cue scene," "That's a wrap," "Cut!" and "Costume department." Assistant producers, after hauntings, deliver coffee. In a literal sense, Spirited's filmmakers jettison the Judeo-Christian tradition and replace it with themselves, that is, with Hollywood.

 

But wait, there's more. Clint is killed when he stops Scrooge from committing suicide by standing in front of a bus. The bus hits Clint instead. Clint replaces Scrooge in the heavenly movie studio. He applies his skills as a political operative to doing the work of saving racist white Karens. But not only. He tells one of his co-producers that he wants a Ramadan Carol and a Hanukkah Carol. Because ya know inclusion. Here Spirited treats Islam and Judaism exactly as it treated the black women in the ice hockey scene, the black women at the British Columbia Christmas tree growers conference, the blacks in the Victorian crowd scene, Sunita Mani and Tracy Morgan.

 

You want a scene with black people playing sports in the streets? Basketball. And not a suburban cul-de-sac crowded with McMansions, but an urban playground. You want a conference scene featuring black women? Not a Christmas tree growers' conference, but a conference of church ladies or small business owners. You want a holiday story honoring Judaism or Islam? Judaism and Islam are not Christianity. They are their own religions with their own worldviews, narratives, heroes, and value systems.

 

When, at the end of Spirited, Ryan Reynolds announces that he wants Ramadan and Hanukkah versions of A Christmas Carol, he is not being truly diverse or inclusive. Rather, he is exploiting Islam and Judaism to trumpet his own inclusiveness. In fact he is suppressing the unique, non-Christian identity of Judaism and Islam. All diversity is absorbed into the Woke Borg. Ironically, the real story of Hanukkah exactly is resistance to any such absorption.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

"A Sexplanation" A New Documentary, Recommended for Children, Raises More Questions than it Answers

 

A Sexplanation is an 81-minute, 2021 documentary that recommends rejection of a perceived, specifically American and Judeo-Christian mishandling of sex. The documentary recommends a shame-free and judgment-free approach to sex for American schoolchildren. The documentary stars 36-year-old Alex Liu, a gay Chinese-American. Liu co-wrote the script, and co-produced the film.
 
Liu's biography states that his work "explores taboo topics like sex and drugs in order to broaden our understanding of science, morality, and how to negotiate a meaningful life. He's developed two YouTube channels focused on sex and drug education, totaling over five million views." Liu's work has appeared on NOVA scienceNOW, CNN Health, and NPR.

 

A Sexplanation enjoys a 100% professional critics' score at RottenTomatoes. The L.A. Times called the film "admirable" and "entertaining." Other reviews are equally laudatory: "illuminating and funny"; "educates while entertaining"; "full of wisdom"; "timely and hilarious; a big brain event"; "a sex-positive breath of fresh air and an encouragement that we can break the cycles of shame … and finally move enthusiastically toward the enjoyment of pleasure, intimacy, and a healthier sexuality." "This is a film that the whole family can watch … to get over the shame of who we are … Alex Liu can save us all!"

 

The New York Times selected A Sexplanation as a "Critics' pick" and called the film "insightful." A Sexplanation is "suitable to be shown in a classroom."

 

A Sexplanation immediately begins with its America-bashing premise. "Sex. In America, an obsession. In other parts of the world, a fact," reads a text on the screen. The quote is attributed to Marlene Dietrich.

 

America is "a country raised to fear sex," Liu intones. Because of America, Liu has been so terrified that he considered taking his own life. "I love dick. The way they look, the way they feel, the way they taste," he says, holding up what appears to be a chocolate-covered ice cream treat in the size and shape of a penis and testicles. He takes a bite, and then says he wants to "blame my mommy and my daddy" for his psychological problems.

 

Liu's parents and grandmother are seated on a couch. The film is only up to the seven-minute mark when Liu moves from blaming America, and his parents, for his sexual problems. He moves on to blaming the Catholic Church. Why? His mother said that as a "Catholic, Asian girl" she was expected to be "modest."

 

America and Catholicism cause Americans to feel "shame." Shame must be eliminated. Then Liu and his comrades can erase the evil past and erect a "sexual nirvana." This Utopia will be similar to San Francisco. A Sexplanation's San Francisco is scenic, sunny, and full of happy, smiling people. It is Liu's "safe space."

"Lethal Tides" A New Book about World War II Scientists Sheds Light on Lesser Known Heroism

 

Lethal Tides
A New Book about World War II Scientists Sheds Light on Lesser Known Heroism

 

Lethal Tides: Mary Sears and the Marine Scientists Who Helped Win World War II by Catherine Musemeche was published in August, 2022, by William Morrow. It is 320 pages long with twelve pages of black-and-white illustrations. Musemeche is a pediatric surgeon, professor of surgery, and author of two previous books addressing medical topics. Musemeche dedicates Lethal Tides to her father, Frank M. Musemeche, QM3 United States Navy. Musemeche's father was 17 when he served in the waters around Okinawa "when kamikazes started raining down from the skies … five thousand sailors were killed that day by suicide bombers."

 

"She Said" Is a Terrific Movie. Go See It.

 

She Said is a 2022 film about Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's New York Times investigation of Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse of female underlings. The film stars Carey Mulligan as Twohey and Zoe Kazan as Kantor. It was directed by Maria Schrader. The screenplay was written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. It was released on November 18, 2022. It has an 87% professional critic score at RottenTomatoes, and an 87% audience score. In spite of positive reviews, the film opened to weak box office.
 
I vowed to myself that I would not see She Said. I'm a feminist and I've been subject to sexual harassment, but the Me Too phenomenon that followed the Weinstein scandal struck me as flawed. Too many Me Too discussions oversimplified the problem. These simplified discussions depicted men as rapists and women as victims and an incoherent and racist rage against "white men" as some kind of solution. Hollywood actresses participate in the objectification of women, and female participation in female degradation renders the "men are bad" solution ridiculous.

The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: Candace Owens' New Documentary

 

The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM
Every Adult American Should Watch Candace Owens' New Documentary

 

Candace Owens' October, 2022, 80-minute documentary, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM, a Daily Wire production, is an agonizing watch. Beginning in spring, 2020, destructive and deadly riots broke out across the United States. These riots self-advertised as being all about a "racial reckoning."

 

If you were a leftist living in a comfortable suburb far from the arson, looting, and public torture, you could look on and cheer the apparent downfall of the country and the value system you benefit from, and that you irrationally and hypocritically hate. If you were, like me and millions of others, living in a majority-minority, low-income city already burdened with high murder rates, 2020's riots felt like a terrifying, demoralizing death spiral. We never knew when our homes would burn, when our grocers would be looted and permanently closed, when our fragile economies of immigrant-run mom-and-pop shops would be cut off at the knees, when our banks would shrug, give up, and leave town, when our cars would be incinerated, when our property values, already low, would plummet, when our black and Latino police officers would be shot dead, and when we would be the bystanders whose random death would add to the body count. In addition to those killed in the riots, 2,457 more black Americans were murdered in 2020 than in 2019, "marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes." Anti-policing policies and attitudes and increasing lawlessness are to blame for these deaths and thousands more, research has shown.

 

Money is less of a concern for rich leftists than it is for those of us who are living on the edge. The poor know that poverty can be a death sentence. As we watched looters empty stores, especially stores in neighborhoods like ours, majority minority, economically weak urban enclaves, we knew: everything is about to start costing a lot more. Someone has to pay for the CVS, the Walgreens, and Walmarts being emptied out. The looters aren't paying, so we will. The over-the-counter medications we rely on for chronic illnesses, drugs not covered by insurance, will take income away from our food budgets. Insurance rates will skyrocket, as will inflation. The little money we have will be worth less.

 

No, if you were a comfortable leftist living in a safe suburb you didn't have to confront the consequences of your support for BLM. I just had a quick look at the pages of Facebook friends who posted wall-to-wall BLM support during 2020's riots. One is now posting updates on the performance of her thoroughbred horses in various show competitions. One, who sobbed over the death of Queen Elizabeth, is now visiting Buckingham Palace. One has gone back to posting her scores in online word games. Another posts stunning photos of her expansive gardens. Their BLM passion was as short-lived as it was shallow.

 

Clearly, rich leftists have moved on to the next fad. We in blighted urban neighborhoods will never move on. Riots scar a city for generations. Capital, jobs, and safety depart and move to greener pastures. Newark has yet to recover from the riots of the 1960s. One estimate of the total cost of the George Floyd riots is $2 billion. That number is too low, for a few reasons. The Foundation for Economic Education explains. "Seventy-five percent of US businesses are under-insured and about forty percent of small businesses have no insurance at all. Their untold millions in losses don’t show up in the $2 billion figure …  riots leave a lasting shadow on a city that haunts its economy for decades. The afflicted areas face higher insurance rates, lower property values, higher prices, reduced tax revenue, and decreased economic opportunity." Finally, the damage done to human bodies and souls is not factored in to the $2 billion tab. An elderly man attempted to defend a property. Rioters broke his jaw. His pain and suffering, and subsequent sense of isolation and insecurity, and that of thousands of others, inevitably produces an economic drag, one it is difficult to estimate, but is no less real.

 

And all for nothing. Every last looting spree, every last rock thrown at the head of a beaten, bleeding white man lying helplessly in the street, every defaced synagogue, every not just ignorant but insane tearing down of a statue of a martyr to abolition like Hans Christian Heg or Abraham Lincoln, was for absolutely nothing. As Heather MacDonald, Roland G. Fryer, John McWhorter and others struggled to communicate, America is not racist, and there is no statistical support for the claim that there is an epidemic of white cops shooting unarmed black men to death for no reason. Officer Derek Chauvin was arrested four days after the death of George Floyd. He was rapidly charged, convicted, and imprisoned. In mainstream and social media, Chauvin was universally condemned, by both the left and the right. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, beloved by police officers, famous as a tough-on-crime icon, roundly and repeatedly condemned Chauvin on his WABC radio show.

 

Owens' The Greatest Lie Ever Sold adds to the agony with simple truths. I want every American to watch this documentary, even though I know that watching it may well hurt.

 

The film opens with a quote from Malcolm X. "The Media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the make the guilty innocent." I differ from Owens on this point. The media includes Candace Owens, and the media includes this review. The media is vast and consumers can select what media they support.

 

Next we see video of Floyd purchasing cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. The employees in the store are clearly minorities themselves. Cup foods employee Mike Abumayyaleh explains that they only call the police if the person using a counterfeit bill refuses to pay with other tender. George Floyd, apparently, when confronted, refused to pay with a real bill. In his refusal to use real money, even when confronted, Floyd made one of many choices that preceded his death. Officer Thomas Lane's bodycam shows Floyd in a car with his drug dealer, not cooperating with the police. A caption reports that he resisted being placed in a squad car for eight minutes. Derek Chauvin was called in as backup. Had Floyd not resisted arrest, Derek Chauvin would never have been on the scene.

 

The film cuts to Candace Owens' June 3 video. Owens, a black woman, rejected worldwide hysteria turning George Floyd into a Messianic figure. "I do not support George Floyd and the media depiction of him as a martyr for black America." She cited Shelby Steele, paraphrasing him as saying that blacks are unique in that they "cater to the bottom denominator in our society." Jews, whites, and Latinos, she said, would not hold up a felon as a culture hero. Owens made clear that she was not defending Derek Chauvin and she hoped to see Chauvin receive appropriate justice. She said also that the family of George Floyd deserves justice for the "way that he died." "But I'm not going to accept the narrative that this is the best that the black community has to offer.' "It has become fashionable for us to turn criminals into heroes." "The only way you can be black is to say that this person was amazing. I'm not going to do that. George Floyd was not amazing." "Everyone agrees that the police officer was wrong and the police officer has been arrested. That's not something that has been misconstrued in the media." Any black person who does not go along with the celebration of criminals is labeled a "coon." Condoleezza Rice, Dr. Ben Carson, Larry Elder are all, in this understanding, "coons," because they are educated high achievers.

 

Any fair minded person watching Owens' June 3 video immediately realizes two things. The first thing a fair-minded person realizes is that Candace Owens is a straight-shooter and a person of depth and conscience. She is struggling to be as fair as possible in a very difficult situation. She never says that Floyd deserved to die as he did; she says quite the opposite. She never defends Chauvin; she says he deserves "justice." No matter how hard Owens works to state a simple truth – she does not believe that black people benefit from making criminals their heroes – the viewer knows that Candace Owens will be vilified, threatened, and damned for what she had the courage and decency to say.

 

Dave Chappelle exhibited his signature cruelty, bullying, cowardice, misogyny, and, most important, his complete dishonesty. "Candace Owens tried to convince white America, 'Don't worry about it. He's a criminal anyway.'" Chappelle is lying. Candace Owens said no such thing, and she clearly wasn't talking to "white America."  In his pot-and-tobacco ruined voice, his eyes bugging out of his bald head, Chapelle gurgled out that Candace Owens is a "rotten bitch" and he mentioned kicking Owens in her "stinky pussy."

 

Owens said that such attacks made everything "personal" for her. "I am going to scream the truth" more loudly than others "can scream the lies." Candace Owens has more courage and integrity in her little finger than Dave Chappelle has in his six foot frame.

 

Owens visits George Floyd's housemates, Alvin Manago and Theresa Scott. Their previously shared home looks lovely; his roommates, a man and a woman, come across as nice people. Both are kind and respectful in their comments about Floyd. They acknowledge that Floyd was an addict, but say that he kept that out of the house. The man they knew was a valued friend, they insist.

 

Manago says that at memorials people would circulate metal boxes and ask for money. "I don't know who you are or where this is going." Clips show the Floyd family acknowledging trips to the White House and crying. The documentary reports that none of them ever went to Floyd's house to pick up his things. His car was still in the driveway. Neither Manago nor Scott had the paperwork necessary to address the car. Owens herself arranged to have it removed, and she gave Manago and Scott money to cover the rent they lost after Floyd's death.

 

In the film, Scott emphasizes how surprised she was that no family members ever came to Floyd's home for the final years of his life, the home where his belongings were still to be found. Manago says that he would like to meet Floyd's daughter, as that daughter is "an extension of him." Manago and Scott chat about people coming forward and claiming to be Floyd's children, but proven wrong through DNA checks. Evidently there were rumors that some tried to capitalize on worldwide sympathy for Floyd by claiming false relationships. The documentary does not make clear if these rumors are accurate.

 

Owens lays bare George Floyd's extensive criminal history. In 2007, Floyd and his accomplices forced entry into the home of Aracely Henriquez, pistol-whipped her, and ransacked her home. Henriquez's seven-year-old son identified Floyd. "How absolutely traumatized that child was," Owens remarks. "Just a few years later, children are wearing his shirt, and referring to him as hero and savior. That's wrong … Two things can be true at once. George Floyd didn't deserve to die. And this person was not a saint," she says.

 

In a 2019 arrest video, "I want my momma, man," Floyd moans. Who exactly was George Floyd's "momma"? On the witness stand, Courtney Ross, Floyd's girlfriend, with whom he sometimes used opioids, testifies that Floyd called her "momma," and indeed his listed her phone number on his phone as "momma." "Calling out for his mother was a nice victim narrative," Owens observes.

 

Owens is shown speaking on her phone to an interlocutor we cannot hear. This, we learn, is Derek Chauvin's mother. For understandable reasons, she is afraid to speak to Owens. Unable to gain access to Chauvin or his mother, Owens turns to people who knew him. Sargent Joey Sandberg says that "Derek is quiet, somewhat quirky, very dependable. Derek is the kind of guy you want to show up on your calls with you. He's very level headed." Sandberg says that Chauvin is allowed no reading material, no TV, no computer, and he is alone in his cell twenty-three hours a day. Since the documentary was filmed, Chauvin has been moved to another prison.

 

Lieutenant Kim Voss insists that Chauvin never revealed any racist tendencies. Indeed, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Muslim and a black man, said, "I wouldn't call [Floyd's death a hate crime] because hate crimes are crimes where there's an explicit motive and bias. We don't have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd's race as he did what he did."

 

In the "widely circulated video taken by a bystander" "the camera angle suggests" that Chauvin "kneeled on George Floyd's neck the whole time." But Officer Alexander Kueng's camera showed Chauvin's knee on Floyd's shoulder blade. How long Chauvin's knee was on Floyd's shoulder has been debated. In other video, Floyd also says "I can't breathe" before he is put on the ground, at his own request.

 

Dr. Ron Martinelli is a forensic criminologist and Certified Medical Investigator. Martinelli tells Owens that there was evidence that Floyd had consumed a lethal cocktail of fentanyl and methamphetamine. In video from the trial, Dr. Andrew Baker, Chief Medical Examiner of Hennepin County, testifies that the level of fentanyl found in Floyd's system, had he been found dead absent any interaction with police, would have been assessed as enough to have killed him. "I would certify his death as fentanyl toxicity."

 

Martinelli says that Floyd's heart suffered from cardiomegaly, that is, an enlarged heart, a sign of ill health. "That is significant." "There is zero evidence," he says, to prove that Floyd was unable to intake sufficient oxygen. The suggestion is that Floyd did not die of asphyxiation. This conclusion is controversial and debated. On October 17, for example, the Washington Post accused Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, of lying when he said that Floyd died from a drug overdose. The reason that the asphyxiation v. drug overdose battle is so hot is clear. If Floyd died of a drug overdose, he was responsible for his own death and the larger narrative becomes an anti-drug-abuse narrative. If Derek Chauvin asphyxiated Floyd, Chauvin is responsible for his death, and the larger narrative is one of black innocence, white racism, and police brutality.

 

Owens interviews a few people whose lives where damaged by Floyd protestors. Liz Collin is a former news anchor. She is married to former Minneapolis police chief Bob Kroll. "Within minutes" of Floyd's death, Collin reports, tweets appeared saying, paraphrase, Bob Kroll and Liz Collin will be dead by the time the year ends. The mob also threatened to murder their seven-year-old son. Protestors made pinatas of Collin and Kroll dressed as Klansmen. and Representative John Thompson, spewing obscenities, beat these effigies in Collin's and Kroll's home driveway. Collin lost her job, and was unable to get any other job.

 

Kitson is a boutique in LA where celebrities sometimes shop. Fraser Ross is the owner. He called Kitson "a general store for the rich." Looters stole over $400 thousand dollars of merchandise. Chrissy Teigen posted that she would donate hundreds of thousands of dollars in bail money for rioters. "They all live in gated communities and it's not their stuff being destroyed," Ross observes.

 

Ross posted a looting photo and said "Thanks Chrissy." She replied, "I'm gonna not shop at your store so hard." Influencers Jen Atkin and Dana Omari inevitably accused Ross of being a racist. Omari sent Ross a lengthy private message detailing how he must grovel in public to avoid further wrath. During a phone call, Omari extorted a ten thousand dollar donation to Black Lives Matter. Without that donation, she said, she would ruin his business through her internet posts.

 

Not just individual lives, but the lives of communities were destroyed by the Floyd riots. These were largely non-white, low-income communities. Pastor Charles Karuku grew up in Kenya. He is president of Unity Movement Institute. Of the Floyd riots, Pastor Karuku says, "I'm used to this in Third World countries, but not in America, and not in Minnesota … This is not 'Minnesota Nice.'" Karuku and Owens walk past a sign reading, "You are now entering the Free State of George Floyd."

 

Karuku explains, "This is an autonomous zone that operates outside the laws of the United States … They do whatever they want … We've seen a woman who was pregnant shot right in front of us."

 

Shops are boarded up. Insurance would never cover all the losses. Owens and Karuku pass an open-air altar to George Floyd. There is a drawing in the street representing his body. Flowers and artwork surround it. A cardboard sign reads, "Sacred space."  

 

"We have better people to follow," the pastor says. "Like Jesus Christ, who epitomized what we would like to emulate."

 

"BLM raised ninety million dollars on the back of George Floyd. Where is that money?" Owens asks.

 

"I don't know. It's not here … Everything looks worse than it was… Some of these organizations can only get money if they propagate hatred. They are not helping the community. They are helping themselves," Karuku says.

 

George Floyd's former housemates say that they have not seen a dime of BLM money, though they are carrying the expenses Floyd used to carry.

 

Silicone Valley entrepreneur and bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy says that during the Floyd riots, his business milieu insisted on "a pledge of allegiance to this one man into some type of new modern messiah figure. The religious quality was odd. The bending the knee … I didn't recite the same ritual incantation that every other CEO was pledging allegiance to across the country."

 

A BLM front person bought a mansion for three million, and then sold it to BLM for six million within days, creating a personal profit of three million. "That's a self-dealing transaction."

 

BLM founder Patrisse Cullors hired her mother and her brother to work at the property. The brother is a graffiti artist. He was hired to handle security. His salary is $840 thousand for one year. Cullors' baby daddy received $969 thousand. Cullors also channeled money to her wife, Jenaya Khan, who appears to have had surgery to appear as a male. Even so, a photo of Khan can receive this kind of caption from Vogue, "Louis Vuitton vest and pants. Mejuri pendant necklace. Hair, Marcia Hamilton; makeup, Tasha Reiko Brown. Fashion Editor: Yashua Simmons. Produced by: GE Projects. Photographed by Melodie McDaniel." A bit different from "Arise ye prisoners of starvation. Arise ye wretched of the earth."

 

BLM has poured over two million dollars into trans groups, including groups for trans sex workers. Owens attempts to investigate Living through Giving, an organization that received $2.3 million from BLM. Photos reveal that Cullors knew the recipient, AJ Vreeland, at least as early as 2019. Living through Giving purports to distribute free lunches. Owens was unable to find any such distribution.

 

$32 million of Marxist, anti-Western, anti-American BLM's assets went into the stock market.

 

Owens goes to "celebrity enclave" Laurel Canyon. In this segment, petite Candace Owens is very obviously pregnant. She is dressed, as ever, impeccably. She merely approaches the gate of Cullors' mansion, a mansion purchased with the blood of innocents like David Dorn.

 

Intercut with Owens' inoffensive approach to Cullors' mansion is video of Cullors herself, whining online that Candace Owens is threatening her. It would be comical were it not so disgusting. Owens is a petite woman; she is carrying a child; she is speaking in soft, polite tones. All she wants is to speak to someone. Cullors labels Owens' visit a veritable terrorist assault. "She was demanding that I come outside," Cullors lies into her video camera. "It's unacceptable and it's dangerous to come outside of my house." One thinks of the houses burned to the ground by Cullors' followers. "What happened this morning is not safety. It's not what I deserve. It's not what any of us deserve. They're trying to destroy me." No, Cullors. Owens was just trying to tell the truth.

 

It goes without saying that Cullors' security team is, as Owens reports, a white male and a German shepherd.

 

"What could be more emblematic of BLM than that?" Owens asks. "Playing the victim, to the public, hoping that you can get sympathy and that sympathy will transform into dollars." "The real story" of George Floyd's death, Owens insists, "is a story of addiction. That could have brought people together globally. This was a man who was high on drugs … it is a story of a man who overdosed." Instead, BLM uses "black emotion and black pain to extort dollars from white America."  

 

In 2020, Minneapolis saw a 58% increase in murder. In 2021, the city recorded the highest number of homicides in over 20 years.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery